Saturday, July 16, 2011

The Days of Lilies

Way back when, in the 1970's, I started gardening in my yard.  For the first four years it was a very part-time job, since I was working full-time in the City.  And then I stayed home and had three children to raise.  By the time I went back to school for my MBA, I had pretty much gotten the yard planned out, or so I thought.  It seems it never ends.

When it came to flowers, I had two weaknesses - daylilies and hostas.  One required lots of sun and the other required shade.  Having purchased a house with not one thing growing on the property, shade was hard to come by.  Not so today.  The only really sunny part is on the north side in the flower beds.  And that is where I am growing more than 30 varieties of daylilies- all of them moved from their original location and no longer labeled.

So for the last few days, I have been trying to discover what I have.  I dug out all of my old charts, yes I had garden planting charts, and my purchase lists from the grower, and all sorts of notes on when everything bloomed.  Remember, I started this before there was any internet or computers to keep track of data.

I do not think I have accomplished anything.  Obviously, some varieties were purchased without being recorded.  And while I seemed to remember having a variety called Jock Randall, it appears that I meant to purchase it, but can find nothing to indicate I ever did.  And nothing in the garden fits the description at the AHS database.

So, I am only half-way to figuring things out and other than me, I doubt anyone cares.  I am certain of some varieties if only because they have never moved or I actually made a record of them.  And not all the plants are in bloom yet, so I may be further ahead or farther behind when it happens.

For those of you who love flowers, I offer some of mine:

Green Flutter

Sunset Sonata

Oriental Ruby (the sun kept diluting the color, so I took the picture inside)


Royal Flair

Love that Pink


I have some plants that need to be moved out of shade and I'm giving some to my son for his house and then I have to move hostas into the shade areas.  And then I guess I will want to figure out what varieties I have of those too.  Good thing I have 'free time'.

2 comments:

  1. I can relate to the daylily situation you describe, and did a search for "too many daylilies" as they are starting to take over my yard. can't bear to just shovel prune and pitch the extras.Only this morning the thought was" maybe I could take out the veggies and make it daylilies",I only have 40 named lilies, some clumps so close together now that I am thinking of large machinery to dig them up. Obsessed? Yes, they are like friends and at the age of 70 I wonder how many more years I will want to be doing an acre of gardening. I stopped buying more and thought 40 was a lot, until I see on some forums that other daylily druggies have hundreds of different ones. Digging and selling is so much work, so it may be I have to freecycle the excess. I still work part-time, just to get a day of rest from garden chores. haaha

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